Things are about to get really meta. Last weekend Marc Maron — comedian and host of the podcast WTF — was in Chicago for a series of shows at the Mayne Stage in Rogers Park. Maron's known for his distinctive free-form style; during his sets he often launches into long, stream-of-consciousness storytelling.

- "Editor's note: As originally published, our review implied that an actor's costume contained padding. As the actor has noted in the comments below, it does not. We deeply regret the error," says this review of Sordid Lives at Ludicrous Theatre Company. The comment? From Suzanne Bracken, who plays LaVonda. She wrote, "I'm just fat, not wearing a fat suit. Some people are just shaped differently than others." Another commenter responds, "Wow, Suzanne, you are more gracious than I would have been." In other Sordid Lives reviews, Chicago Theater Beat says Bracken "nearly steals the show."

- BackStage Theatre Company is closing up shop; their current production of A Scent of Flowers will be their last one.

On Tuesday, Ann Romney's dressage horse, Rafalca, failed to get anywhere close to Olympic gold. But the legacy of the horse — the presidential candidate's wife's horse — lives on. Michael Patrick Thornton gets inside the mind of Rafalca to almost become the horse, and even defends his owner. Read an excerpt below or listen above:

You know how like in baseball you have three strikes and you’re out, according to the Major League Baseball Association? Well in dressage, at the international level at which I compete, dressage is governed by the FEI and the Prix St. George Intermediare 1, Intermediare 2, and the Grand Prix. Dressage tests are segmented into a number of sequential blocks. Each block is scored between one and ten and marks are awarded for gaits, impulsion, the rider’s performance, and submission.

Generations of producers, directors and actors have joked that "the only good playwright is a dead playwright," and sometimes they are half-serious . . . but only sometimes and only half. They damn well know that theater requires a steady diet of new works, and everyone one of 'em constantly is on the lookout for the next hot author and the next great script.

Still, a dead playwright can't argue about how the play is cast, about whether or not the design elements meet the author's intentions, about changes to the script or about radical directorial concepts, let alone gross misinterpretations by actors. Perhaps the old joke should be altered to read "the only safe playwright is a dead playwright."

Except that's not true, either. Even dead playwrights can rise from the grave to bite you in the butt if they have well-managed literary estates and surviving copyright holders. Case in point, some years ago Chicago's long-gone (but then high-flying) Remains Theatre staged the Kurt Weill-Bertolt Brecht opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.

Year in and year out, Chicago's 220-plus producing theater companies offer 40 to 50 new productions every month of the year, with about 40 percent of them being world premieres of new works. My choices this week are two new plays by two Chicago playwrights.

Fathers and sons are at the fore in Adrift, a world premiere by award-winning Chicago playwright David Alex. He posits Jack, a retired naval officer with Vietnam on his resume, and his math teacher son, Isaac, shadowed by school principal Judd and his football-player son, Tom. Generational disputes, philosophies of life, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and the tricks of memory all come into play as Isaac recollects his life, his now-deceased dad and his teaching career.

- The Cupid Players' Cupid Has A Heart On: A Musical Guide to Relationships is moving from iO to Stage 773. The show, currently in it's 10th year, will run every Saturday starting August 11 at 10:30 pm.“We are grateful to everyone at iO Theatre who made the last decade of Cupid Players a success, especially Charna Halpern (executive director of iO)," said Brian Posen in a statement. "Now that the construction is done and Stage 773 is up and running, it makes sense, as producers of The Cupid Players, to have them be a part of our Stage 733 family. We look forward to opening night and a long successful run in their new home."

- I Am A Rocket Scientist from Screen Door opens at the new University of Chicago Logan Arts center this Saturday; after that, it moves to Collaboraction.